It’s sad to report that the UK Marketplace Buuy.co.uk will be completely closing its doors on the 28th of February. You can see an image of the email sent to all sellers on the left hand side of this post.
So why didn’t it work out? Funding and investment was the key problem. As we noted last August, they started a crowdfunding campaign to keep the doors open. It wasn’t a success.
And whilst their approach was doubtless innovative, it made no sense that they didn’t seek buyer or sellers fees whilst also not have strong funding to back that. A modest listing fee was subsequently introduced, but it seems like the business model was simply unsustainable.
Previously they said of their approach and marketplace:
Buuy.co.uk, The No Fees UK Classifieds & Auction Marketplace is a simple, easy and Free to use marketplace that allows you to list and sell any item for FREE! It is Free to Join, Free to List and Free to Sell on Buuy.co.uk – NO COMMISSION! Whether it’s old, new, secondhand, handmade, upcycled or recycled – we want it all on Buuy.co.uk! Help make Buuy the #UK’s No 1 marketplace!
– Buuy.co.uk
And even today, after the email alert, the homepage says:
Joining, Listing and Selling is completely free and if you want a storefront, it will cost just £10.00 per month (From 1st Feb 2018) and you can list up to 5,000,000 items!!
– buuy.co.uk
Even if they had charged fees, marketplaces and ecommerce is simply a very difficult environment to enter and succeed within. Amazon and eBay are dominant players and making an impact against the big boys requires verve and differentiation, and big marketing bucks, and Buuy just didn’t have the funds.
Were you selling on Buuy? How will you be impacted?
We’re very grateful to the Tamebay correspondent who sent us the screengrab of the buuy.co.uk email.
2 Responses
I suggested to them that they didn’t charge to list but did charge a FVF as if listing is free I am happy to add thousands of items if I only pay if they sell, and they said they were not interested.
I don’t think that most business sellers are looking for a totally free platform, if I can get sales I am happy to pay for it and I think that is were they went wrong, how did they think they would pay for the servers and staff if they were charging nothing?
Yes i was selling on Buuy and had made 1 sale in December on 15 items i had listed.
I have now moved over to Ecrater which is really great for displaying all your products in Google shopping through the Google shopping feed.
Buuy was very good and easy to use, just very little traffic. The only listing fee was the 4% Paypal fee and the monthly store subscription fee of £10 per month.
I’m hoping for much better success on Ecrater. Long time Ebay seller, but extremely fed up with upwards of 16% final value fees there.
Also with the grouped listing option replacing Best Match in Ebay ( ending up with the massive Ebay sellers getting all the profits ), i’m more confident of leaving Ebay for good